Reflecting the Sky

by S. J. Rozan

  “After China changed,” he went on, still speaking to the harbor, “I tried to end Lion Rock’s involvement. Three times I went to Lee, saying the danger is over, I would like to sever our ties. He would not permit it. Now, of course, now that my brother has died, now that my nephew is entering the business here in Hong Kong, not in New York far away—now at least he understands continuing is impossible.”

  To the east along the shoreline the colored neon crowns of the buildings were starting to shine. Enough, I suddenly decided. I don’t care. Damn the smuggling. I stood because I couldn’t keep still anymore.

  “Mark—”

  “I know,” Mark said. He turned to speak to Wei Ang-Ran, but as he did the conference room door opened and a uniformed cop stuck his head in.

  “Sergeant, call for you. Your desk phone.”

  Mark’s eyes met mine as he rose swiftly. Heading around the table and out the door, he pointed at Wei Ang-Ran. “Stay with him,” he ordered the uniform. “He doesn’t leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was right on Mark’s heels through the maze to his desk. He leaned across the desk to grab up his phone, barked, “Wai! Wai!”

  Beyond the partitions, in the maze, the sounds of cops coming and going. In here, silence. Mark, holding the phone to his ear, walked around the desk and sat in the chair behind it. Listening, listening—finally, in Cantonese, he asked, “What about the woman? Does Ko have her?”

  More silence while he listened to the answer.

  “No,” Mark said. “Yes, okay.”

  I squeezed my hands into tight fists of frustration while I followed Mark’s half of this conversation. It was like listening to a radio broadcast constantly interrupted by static.

  “Shit,” Mark said. “Damn. No, it’s not your fault, Shen.” Glancing at his watch: “Well, that depends—you’re off duty by now, you want to stay with it? … They’re triad, Strength and Harmony. The European’s an American cop … . No, unofficial … . Because you didn’t need to know until now, Shen.” Longer pause. “No.” Pause. “All right, good.” Another silence, ending with, “We will. Good work, Shen.”

  He hung up, looked up at me, switched to English. “Shen stayed on Smith while he talked to Siu and Chou and followed them when they went off together. Ko tried to stay with Maria Quezon but he lost her. I can see that; the town there is worse than Wan Chai, where we lost the prayer-seller.”

  “And?”

  “Smith, Siu, and Chou got on a boat, a small launch, and headed around the south side of Cheung Chau. Shen says it looked like Smith went under his own steam, that he wasn’t coerced. Shen and Ko rented a sampan, all they could get. The launch was too fast for them. They lost it. They’re still on the water, but it’s getting dark.”

  Boats. Bill doesn’t like boats. “You told Shen Bill was a cop,” I said. “He’s not a cop.”

  “But Shen is. He’s likely to take a personal interest in what happens to another cop. He and Ko are going to stay out there, see what they can find.”

  I met Mark’s eyes. They were dark and unguarded, and they looked like mine. Bill’s eyes were deep-set, shadowed. “Thank you,” I said.

  He nodded. “I think—”

  But I wasn’t about to hear what Mark thought. Cutting off his words, a cell phone rang. Mine, cheeping from my belt. I hate you, I thought as I yanked at it and flipped it open. You stupid thing, I hate you.

  And then was immediately sorry, because the voice was Bill’s.

  “Lydia, it’s me.” His words, I thought, sounded wrong: tight and strained. A chill touched my spine.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “Where are you?”

  “A boat, off Cheung Chau.” No more answer than that.

  “Are you all right?” I asked again.

  “Been better,” he said. “Not as tough as I thought. Should have trained longer. Maybe as a stuntman.” A laugh, without humor.

  He’s hurt, I thought, hurt badly enough that he’s not thinking straight. “Bill—”

  Then a voice that wasn’t his.

  “He’s definitely been better,” Tony Siu said in Cantonese. “But he could definitely be worse. How’re you doing?” As though we were making casual conversation.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I demanded.

  “I want the kid,” Tony Siu said, in the same easygoing manner. “What I really want is to throw your friend here into the ocean so I can watch him kick for a while before he sinks. But I can wait. I can probably wait until morning. If I don’t have the kid by morning, splash.”

  Careful, Lydia, I told myself. Take a deep breath and play this carefully. “I don’t have him,” I said. “Harry. I don’t know where he is.”

  “That’s what your friend says. It’s what he says now, at least. An hour or so ago on the Praya he said for the right price he’d take us straight to him.” I looked up at Mark. His jaw was tight with the same frustration that had clenched mine a few minutes back.

  “We worked out a deal,” Tony Siu went on. He was much more articulate in Chinese than in English, but it didn’t make him more likable. “He’d been sitting there with the kid’s amah looking into each other’s eyes like they just got out of bed, so I figured he knew. Actually, I still think he knows, but he wants to be a fucking American hero. Anyway, he says he knows, so we rent this stinking boat. Sail around to the ass end of this stinking island. Now he tells me he doesn’t have any fucking idea where the kid is, he was just buying the amah time to run.” In English he suddenly exploded, “Cocksucker!”

  I heard a thud, and a groan. “No!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Oh, yes,” Tony Siu’s voice came back. “I don’t like this guy at all.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I told you, I want the kid.”

  “Why?”

  “Fuck you, sweetie. All you need to know is that I’m offering an exchange of merchandise. What I have here is damaged, maybe, but still usable. I thought of you because last night you seemed to care. It’s too late for that nose, by the way, but it wasn’t so great anyway.”

  “Tony, I can’t—”

  “By morning, sweetie. What I want isn’t even yours, so what’s your problem? Unless,” he said, as if something had just occurred to him, “unless you don’t care. Unless you, or whoever the hell it is you work for, don’t really give a shit what happens to this motherfucker. Tell me, because if that’s true I’ll just go on, have a little fun out here, not bother you anymore.”

  “No,” I said. “No. I’ll see what I can do. Leave him alone.”

  “Well, no, that’s not part of the deal. In fact, this merchandise is losing its value as we speak. I’d recommend you get moving.”

  “Tony, if he’s hurt—”

  “What?” A mocking laugh. “What? You’ll do what?”

  Another thud, another groan.

  Another laugh.

  “Get moving, sweetie,” Tony said.

  My stomach churned; I squeezed the phone so hard I thought I’d break it. “How do I contact you?”

  “I’ll take care of that. You have enough problems.” One more laugh, then silence.

  I lowered the phone and folded it.

  “Lydia?” Mark came around the desk. I felt his hands warm on my arms. “Sit down. You’re shivering. What happened? Yang!” he called over the partition to another cop, his voice taking on the cadences of Cantonese. “Bring me some tea in here.” Back to English: “Lydia, what happened?”

  I looked up at him. “They’re on a boat. They want Harry in exchange for Bill.”

  A uniformed cop came around the partition with a steaming cup of tea. Mark nodded at me. I wrapped my hands around the teacup. So damn cold in here, I thought: Why do they keep every place so damn cold?

  “Better?” Mark asked.

  I realized it was the second time he’d asked that. I nodded, sipping.

  “That was Tony Siu?”

  Another nod.

  “Is Smith all
right?” Mark asked quietly.

  I shook my head, all I could do.

  “But he’s alive? You spoke to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” Mark crouched in front of the chair I sat in. “All right. We’ll do everything we can. Tell me what they said.”

  I gave him what I could, Tony Siu’s words so glaringly bright in my mind that I couldn’t clearly see them.

  Mark didn’t move until I was done. Then, perching on the edge of his desk, he picked up a pad and made some notes. “Who’s your cell phone carrier?”

  I told him.

  “Smith’s too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I can put a trace on those, maybe triangulate. It’s a long shot but worth trying. Shen knows what the launch looks like, and Smith says they’re still off Cheung Chau. I can call Marine District; they have boats, and Cheung Chau’s theirs. They can be looking for the amah, too.” He breathed deeply. “Siu said, until morning.”

  “Mark, what are we going to do? Even if we find Harry, we can’t turn him over to them!”

  “Of course we can’t. But if we find him we can talk to them as people with something to trade. Draw them out, bring them to us.”

  Something to trade, I thought. Damaged merchandise.

  “But,” Mark asked, “why the hell do they want him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If the whole thing was a phony kidnapping set up by Wei Ang-Ran, why are they suddenly trying to make it a real one now?”

  “Maybe,” Mark said, tapping his pencil on the pad, “they heard about the second ransom demand, the one you’re trying to tell me Franklin was behind, and they realize there’s two million U.S. to be made by whoever has the boy.”

  “Trying to tell you. You don’t think so?”

  “You told me Grandfather Gao said Franklin’s impulsive but not malicious.”

  “Maybe he had an impulse to make two million dollars.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t fit. And we have him calling L. L. Lee from New York. If you told me he was part of the smuggling operation, I’d think about it. But not this.”

  Franklin working with his father’s brother to smuggle artifacts out of China? Maybe. Maybe not. I didn’t give a damn about that now. Something else had just broken through my thoughts, something very dark lit up by Tony Siu’s glaring words.

  “Beaten up and thrown into the water with his hands tied, to drown.” I stared at Mark. “Isn’t that how Iron Fist Chang died?”

  Mark nodded but he didn’t look at me, and I realized he’d already thought of that but hadn’t told me.

  “Work something else out with me,” he said. I didn’t know if he really wanted something else worked out, or if he just wanted to change the subject. I sipped my tea; it was bitter and overbrewed, but it was warming me up. My mind began to work again; I felt as if a wave had crashed over me, making it hard to see or hear. It was receding now, and I could think again, though everything looked different, strange, rearranged by the tide.

  “If Siu and Chou heard about the second demand, whoever the hell made it, and Franklin’s offer,” Mark said, “how?”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” I said slowly, exploring the landscape around me, the new shapes of things turned up by the waves. “Maybe they didn’t hear about the demand. Maybe they made it.”

  Mark gave me a long skeptical look, then shook his head. “They knew the boy was gone and they decided to get in on the take?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the question’s the same. How did they know?”

  Odd the number of things you can see, things that were hidden but always there, once the tide goes out

  “The Weis apartment was a wreck when we got there,” I said, still speaking slowly. “Mark, it hadn’t been searched. It had been bugged.”

  “Then why—?”

  “To hide their traces. Maybe they broke something, spilled something, I don’t know. They couldn’t hide the fact they’d been there, so they made it look like something else.”

  “Siu and Chou? They were in on it from the beginning? Wei Ang-Ran’s lying?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe they found out from Iron Fist.”

  “Wei Ang-Ran says he only involved him after, to make the phone call.”

  “All right, I don’t know how they found out, but suppose they did. They bugged the apartment, so they knew everything that was going on. They made the second demand themselves.” And, I thought to myself? And so what, Lydia? Does this help find Harry? Does it help Bill? “What’s the difference?” I heard my voice rising, getting a little wild. Breathe, I thought, control, breathe. “Mark, we need to find Harry. We need to find Bill.”

  Mark looked at me, saw in my eyes my need to be up and moving.

  “All right,” he said, looking down at the pad in his hand. “I’m going to get these things started. Then we’ll go up and see the Weis. Then we’ll go to Cheung Chau.”

  “The Weis won’t talk to you.”

  “I have another case now. Two: Smith, and Iron Fist Chang. These guys want Harry in exchange for Smith, now I can go see the Weis. They can deny anything’s wrong if they want. But at least I can tell them I think their place is bugged. If they let me I can send someone up to sweep.”

  I nodded. “Mark?”

  “What?”

  “Thank you. And thank you for not telling me, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.’”

  “It will,” he said, “if I can make it.” He ripped the sheet off his pad. “Hold on,” he said. “This will take a few minutes.” He gave my hand a quick squeeze, the way he had back in the conference room. I didn’t feel quite as hopeful now, but it still helped. Then he left.

  I sat without moving in Mark’s cubicle, listening to the sounds of cops coming and going. Police stations never stop, I thought. You have to keep doing this, do it forever, over and over, because the bad guys, men like Tony Siu, never stop either. Maybe this isn’t really the world. Maybe it’s the afterlife, some kind of purgatory where the punishment for being evil in your last life is to be endlessly, futilely, hopelessly battling evil in this one.

  I tried to remember whether any of the stories I’d heard as a child, any of the ancient tales my father had told, had said anything about that. It was true that the tales said you went on in death according, one way and another, to how you’d been in life. That’s why my mother had sent chef’s knives to my father, why those pottery houses in L. L. Lee’s shop had ducks and chickens and servants. Although I’d rather have the little game players sent into the afterlife with me; I’d rather have friends.

  A thought shot straight through me, almost throwing me out of the chair. L. L. Lee. Oh, my God, Lydia. Bill would do better with those little bronze game players for friends than he’s doing with you.

  But one good thing about this thought being so late in coming: Mark wasn’t here when I had it.

  I grabbed the pad Mark had left behind and scribbled him a note. I’m sorry, it said. I thought of something and I have to do it alone. I’ll call you.

  I propped the pad against his lamp and hurried out of the cubicle, finding my way to the elevator by memory and prayer.

  twelve

  I was afraid Mark, or another cop, or someone, would see me and stop me, but no one did. I walked past the security desk and found myself outside, pushing through the soft blanket of evening heat. I hailed a cab and in Cantonese told the driver, “The home of Lee Lao-Li, on Harlech Road.” Maybe L. L. Lee’s place was as famous as Mark had said and the driver would know right where to go. If not, we could cruise the Peak, looking for Ming lions inside gates on Harlech Road.

  But the driver did know, although the look he gave me in the mirror expressed his doubts about whether, once we found those gates, I’d be allowed through them. I got his point. I’d never in my life felt so wrung out, damp, rumpled, and used-up, and I knew I looked it. It felt like a million years since I’d put on crisp linen a
nd set out with Bill for the Filipina sea.

  I set my phone to vibrate instead of ring, settled back against the seat, and tried to think of nothing as the cab climbed from the glittering neon and whipping traffic of Central through the high-rise residential neighborhood on the hillside above and from there into the leafy darkness of the Peak.

  Here, the road snaked beside rough stone walls, under banyan trees as wide as I was tall, under stands of rubber and maple and shaggy-barked pine with the lights of houses glowing between them. Here, money bought distance from your neighbors, from the smells of their dinners and the noises of their children playing and crying. It bought gardens that were more than pots on windowsills, gardens with paths and palm trees, ponds and benches, where you could stroll and think. It bought rooms where you could read, or study a bronze figure, without having to fold up a daybed or move the breakfast dishes from the table. What money bought here was the privilege of slowing down.

  The cab made a couple of turns on roads that, as far as I could see, did not have road signs. My phone jiggled on my hip twice as we drove. Both times I snatched it up, hoping, but both times the number on the readout was Mark’s, at the station. I let the voice-mail message tell him I’d call him back as soon as I could.

  Finally, as though he did it every day, the driver pulled to a stop at a pair of iron gates. Just inside them two huge curly-maned stone lions, the female on the left with her paw on her cub, the male on the right with his paw on the globe of the world, watched us with glaring eyes and snarling mouths.

  The driver took my money and looked me over once again. “Do I wait?” he asked.

  I thought. “Yes.” Just because I wanted to see L. L. Lee didn’t mean he was home. And if he was, and I saw him, I still wanted to be able to get down from here fast, and go with Mark to Cheung Chau.

  I gave the driver fifty Hong Kong dollars for his waiting time, wondering as I got out whether he’d disappear with it and leave me alone in the dark. Well, if that happened, I’d worry about it later. I pressed the bell. After a foot-tapping wait, during which I was slightly surprised to find that the cab did not drive away, but even turned its radio on and its engine off, a voice issued forth from the speaker set into the gatepost. It asked me in Chinese who I was and what business I had.